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Some people seem to have some difficulties understanding that the whole X infrastructure has been largely rehauled these last years and I guess it's kind of a moving target for drivers devs.
The choice of supporting OSS drivers by AMD has allowed them also to work on the Mesa 3D Stack, improving the whole infrastructure for everyone. I guess AMD could have decided just to concentrate their development effort to the binary blob and like Nvidia, only just provide their OpenGL stack as binary only, completely replacing the OSS one, and I suppose, in that case, that they could have continued to support older cards, not having to pay people to write OSS software.
I appreciate the fact that they decided to do otherwise and to help improve the whole OSS graphic stack.
I also appreciate AMD devs presence on this forum : it's very nice to have inside news. :-)

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If you own 3xx-5xx hardware (you have X1950 ?) you should get familiar with building and running the Gallium3D driver - it's not ready for general use yet but it's making good progress and already has GLSL and GL 2.1 enabled. At minimum you should be monitoring the progress but it wouldn't hurt to try it out periodically. You'll need a new kernel with KMS enabled, don't remember if you are already running KMS.

The Gallium3D driver certainly has its flaws but it's getting to the point where it might be usable for some games. Compiz works for some time and even with some advanced effects it's completely stable and smooth. xmoto and openarena are playable, neverball too if you get lucky, nexuiz would work too if some non-driver-related bugs were fixed. There is a lot of work going on in Gallium3D that some features may stop or start working from time to time.

The hopefully complete TODO list for r300g can be found here in the Gallium section:http://dri.freedesktop.org/wiki/R300ToDo
It's frequently updated so you might get a pretty accurate idea about the current state. 2 or 3 features from that list are performance improvements. If we implemented them, the performance will get back on top.

~ Marek

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bridgman, 8 months *is* a lifetime; linux doesn't update once every 2 to 3 years like OS X or Windows does .. most distros are a rolling update model; and alot of work on other elements like my wireless driver or what not are dependent on using the latest kernels. keeping me from updating my kernel is really restrictive in linux.

that said, i'm sort of in the impression (and correct me if im wrong, though i hope not to be), that alot of basic structural work is being done in the drivers and that sooner or later things will sort of reach 'critical mass' and we'll see a jump in features and performance that should be bring it alot closer to what the closed source alternative (or lack thereof) offers.

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that said, i'm sort of in the impression (and correct me if im wrong, though i hope not to be), that alot of basic structural work is being done in the drivers and that sooner or later things will sort of reach 'critical mass' and we'll see a jump in features and performance that should be bring it alot closer to what the closed source alternative (or lack thereof) offers.

Yep, the drivers advanced to the limit of the then-current framework pretty quickly, and most of the work in the last year has been implementing and transitioning to new framework bits - KMS, GEM/TTM, DRI2, and Gallium3D.

The big success of the last year has been making the new framework run "not much worse than the old one" and distros (other than Fedora) are not going to be picking it up until the spring releases, but it appears that most of the real hard work has been done.

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quaridarium, not everyone is only interested in wine games. lots of people have an old laptop sitting around with an X1600 card in it, that they would like to use with some more basic 3D stuff but can't justify going out to buy a new laptop.

Also, a lot of the wine devs quotes about how they require nvidia extensions is because that's the driver they developed for - if they spent the time to do it, i'm sure they could get it running on the equivalent ati extensions, but no ones really going back to do that work because the hope is that they can just require GL3.2 and forget about older cards that never worked well anyway.

yes...... i realy wrote that only in Wine point of view....
in wine you are lost on an non OpenGl3.2 amd card.

for nativ games.. yes nice....

but..... be sure in the next future time we will have some gread openGL3 only game engines... save a lot of CPU you can play a hardcore game with an monster grafic card on an 1ghz single core CPU.... thats the future of openGL3 engines..